Re: Not Much LINUX Stuff of Late

On 2026-07-27, rbowman wrote:

> On Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:00:30 -0000 (UTC), John McCue wrote:
>
>> For example, users want a browser that blocks ads, no java script, no
>> AI,
>> fast and lite on memory and can read any site without dealing with
>> cloudflare.  What are corporations giving us ?  Nothing but spyware,
>> ads,
>> DRM and soon ID checks.
>
> I use Brave and LibreWolf. The LibreWolf developers have said they'll 
> strip out any AI found in the Firefox codebase. Brave does have the Leo AI 
> that can be disabled. Tor is available from Brave or as a standalone. I 
> use the standalone.
>
> Users may think they don't want JavaScript but that will significantly 
> impact their browsing experience. Better put on a black hat if you expect 
> to sneak by Cloudflare, Anubis, or other tools used by sites to prevent 
> scraping by bots, DDoS attacks, and other 'features' of the web in 2026.

Some Anubis deployments can work without JS, besides being keener on
certain UA strings.

Cloudflare and reCAPTCHA are the great offenders here, and the problem
isn't even requiring JS, it is that they make no effort to be
compatible, and so either you're one of the few browsers they decided to
support or you're out. The issue may even currently be lack of certain
JS features, but they could easily go the extra mile to try to detect
when browsers which behave the same-ish aren't exactly the same.

What's amazing is that they're selling the new "protection" on top of
the old Browser Integrity Check, which did have fallbacks and was
nowhere as limited as "Turnstile". It's also amazing they manage to
retain their business at this scale, given there was at least one
incident where they didn't test and managed to create a self-DDoS...

Google's reCAPTCHA seems to still have some fallbacks, but those aren't
clear in the obfuscated code *and* Google isn't willing to consider
portability, attempts to contact them result in being directed to
StackOverflow...

-- 
Nuno Silva